Recalling all the lessons from my six weeks of echo training, I feel for the edge of my own breach: twenty-six feet in every direction is mine to command as I please. In a flash, I will my dream laws into the fabric of my space, loose enough to give me optimal control, tight enough to maintain a poor illusion that physics applies to dreams. And so, the first thing I do with my altered reality is raise both of my feet and set them down on top of the water.
The next thing I do is turn tail and rush to Jin.
I grab his arms, flip him over, and drag him toward a rounded support ring jutting six inches out of the wall. His face is cut and bruised, and one of his shoulders is dislocated, likely from the crash. Worst is the head wound that knocked him out, oozing blood from the edges around a clearly visible patch of his skull. With all the jostling and bumping he’s experienced since the crash, his brain is probably swelling. Severely. If he doesn’t receive med-four soon, he could experience the sort of brain damage not even nanotech can fix.
I take his pulse with nimble fingers, double check his breathing, and, satisfied that he’s as protected as he can be under the circumstances, I backtrack to the middle of the floodway tunnel and wait for Chelsea Lang to arrive. She’s twenty feet out now, close enough to strike, but Anderson, still recovering from his tumble, is blocking her way. He staggers to his feet, hands on his knees, blood on his face, sand in his lungs, and coughs, coughs, coughs, until he finally gets the sense to pay attention to his surroundings.
But by that point, it’s too late.
I don’t know why Lang agreed to partner with Castile and Anderson in the first place, especially after the two failed to develop adequate echo powers—I suspect it may have been a request from Finn—but after Castile’s foolish suicide run and now, with Anderson’s dismal failure to kidnap easy prey with all the cards in his favor, it appears that Lang is so done with teamwork. Because when Anderson raises his hands to apologize or plead with her or do whatever he thinks will save himself at this point, Lang swats him out of her path with a wind so violent he hits the floodway wall and liquefies.
Bones disintegrate. Organs flatten into mush. An aging man rotund around the middle deflates into a vaguely human-colored pancake, blood syrup gushing out from underneath his skin. The cement wall behind him cracks at the pressure, spider-webbing out from the point of impact.
Anderson doesn’t even fall off the wall. He sticks there.
And Chelsea Lang slows to a stationary hover before me.
From her place six feet off the ground, surrounded by her protective vortex, she looks down at me as if I’m an ant fit to be crushed beneath her winter boots, annoyance in her skewed frown, murder in her narrowed eyes. I can picture her saying, clear as day, like a god from the old religions, Bow and worship me, omnipotent as I am, or I will smite you, fool! But when her lips finally part to speak, all that emerges is, “Move.”
“No.” I stand my ground and clench my fists, tighten my control of my own dream space, a tension rising in the atmosphere.
Lang’s eyes inspect the seemingly empty space on either side of me, and she sneers. “Did you create an echo inside my echo? Don’t you know you’re not supposed to do that? High chance of catastrophic destruction and whatnot?”
“You’re not supposed to murder people either, Lang, but apparently you only follow the rules when they benefit you. I don’t see why I can’t do the same. All’s fair, you know, in war.”
She huffs, and a whip of air lashes out to strike me. But I bat it aside with a twitch of my finger and a simple push of will, and it sideswipes the wall to my left instead, eating a three-inch-deep chunk out of it, like the floodway is made of foam and not cement. A blush creeps up Lang’s cheeks. She lifts her fists for another attack. Her sand coalesces around her body, into spheres of dense sandstone that I foresee her using as cannonballs catapulted by air fast enough to break the sound barrier.
I prepare a counterattack, craft a dozen images in my mind of dream weapons to use against the sandstorm master, bombs and fire and all manner of sharp and pointy things that could pierce her winds and lodge beneath her skin. She reels her arm back, and one of the cannonballs moves with her motion, as if it’s held in an invisible slingshot. Then she flings her arm forward, and the cannonball takes off, barreling toward my face.
I catch it. The way a planet catches an asteroid in its orbit. My body spins around, the sand sphere at my fingertips. I guide it with my mind and hands, brace my feet against the surface of the water, and heave the projectile back at its master with three times the force and a mighty growl.
Lang squeaks and smacks the cannonball with a brutal gust of air, and it goes the way of her wind whip, into the wall, where it disintegrates into a rain of sand. The college student killer glares at me, face beet red, snarling. The winds around her quicken even more, shriek against the confines of the tunnel, a sound that scratches past my eardrums into my tender brain. Her mouth opens to scream at me, announce her next attack, but I’m not content to wait for her next move a third time.
So I create with my mind from the water beneath me the ice spikes from my practice classes. And while Lang is gearing up to fire a barrage of cannonballs at me, I slip the spikes through the murk of the dirty water, horizontal, invisible in the dimness. Lang swings both her arms back and takes command of eight spheres at once, all of them large enough to crush me the same way the wind crushed Anderson. But right as Lang yells to sling her weapons at my face, I jerk my own arms up and launch the ice spikes into the air.
Lang cannot react in time to avoid them all.
She attempts to redirect her cannonballs, transform them into shields, but out of ten spikes, they catch eight, and the remaining two shoot through sand, through her wind vortex…and impale her. One runs straight through her upper thigh and out the other side, colliding with the far wall and shattering. The other lodges halfway in her abdomen at an angle, and the tip emerges from her upper back. With my knowledge of anatomy, I’d guess it cut a kidney in half.
She chokes, less in pain and more in shock, and loses control of her hover, crashing to the floodway floor. Blood soaks the fabric of her red coat, and she grasps at the slick spike, already melting from her body heat, unsure of what to do. If she doesn’t receive medical attention before the spike melts away completely, she’ll bleed to death, at least one artery severed. Trembling and gasping, she stares up at me, and her lips flap in silence like she wants to plead for mercy but can’t find the words in the confines of her arrogant, delusional mind.
“Sorry, Lang. You made your bed.” I turn around and walk away.
My body and Jin’s unconscious one are still braced against the wall, both of them alive and as well as they can be. I need to get them back to the floodway center, closer to the crash site, where the paramedics will be waiting. No time to waste with Jin’s head injury—
Chelsea Lang screams like a dying animal.
I whirl around. To see a wall of sand churning in a vortex so intense that the entire structure of the floodway is fracturing under the strain. Lang, beneath the sand, bares her teeth and shouts, “All you fucking people! Thinking you can win my game. Thinking you can take my prizes. Thinking you can get the best of me. How dare you! Ruin my future. Ruin my life. First Mark. Then Castile. Then Anderson. And now, you! EDPA! Government dogs at their finest.” The wind above her howls like an army burned to ash in hell. “I’ll teach you a lesson. I’ll teach the one lesson you need to learn. Screw with me, and you die!”
The vortex, spinning faster than a twister on the plains, rockets toward me and my body and Jin. So fast that I become Castile in her final moments, unable to do anything coherent except raise my arms and pray the doom away. My brain fires a knee-jerk reaction, funneling every ounce of will, intention, and meaning in my soul to my little pocket dream, creating an invisible wall of pure and utter STOP! The vortex slams against the wall and—splits. Strips itself like a burst gun barrel, curling out in all directions, until three-hun
dred-mile-per-hour wind whips hit the walls.
And then…
After an odd delay, the walls crack. Deep, angled fissures climb up and down and all around, breaking through feet of thick cement, through the steel skeleton beyond, through the very foundations of the floodway. They split the floor underneath us, too, the ground quaking in response, and the water in the tunnel spills out into the fresh gap, soaking the deep, cold earth beneath. And then there’s a groan the likes of which I have never heard, but if I was to guess its resemblance to something, anything, it would be the dirge of the largest animal that has ever walked this planet. That sound, that awful sound—precedes the collapse of the floodway.
A hundred tons of cement implodes. Right on top of us.
Never, ever overlap two breached echoes! said Lucy Granger in a lesson once.
And now, a second from my death, I understand why.
* * *
I turn a woman’s dream to glass and shatter it around her.
But first, I open my sand-scratched eyes, expecting to see the other side, the afterlife, a heaven or a hell, and instead find myself in Chelsea Lang’s desert dream. My bubble echo must have collapsed when the tunnel came down on top of me, and Lang must have lost the concentration necessary to keep her breach open. Thus, my actively dreaming mind got sucked from the ruins of my own echo into Lang’s as it reverted to level two. And so here I am again, lying on a sand dune beneath a scorching sun, my body bent and broken in ways I cannot catalogue.
There’s too much pain. Too many zinging signals running from my nerves to my rattled brain. Broken bones and torn muscles and gaping gashes oozing blood. From the tunnel debris crushing me—it’s a miracle I didn’t end up like Anderson. But even if I didn’t die immediately from tons of cement and earth raining down on my fragile, unconscious form, I may not have much time left. My real body is probably trapped in the rubble. I might be underwater, drowning. Or stuck in an airtight space, suffocating.
And Jin.
Jin was lying against the wall of the tunnel, directly beneath the portion that collapsed.
If he’s dead…
I force myself to my knees, teeth clenched, trying not to scream, as snapped bones shift and grind against damaged flesh. My view from the top of the dune reveals Lang’s castle-like fortress fifty feet away, and through my blurred, watery vision, I spot the culprit of this disaster. Lang, bloody and just as broken as I am, is dragging her body toward the fortress for one final stand. Her dream body was less than twenty feet away from my own when the tunnel went down, and she was too “distracted” by the ice spike in her gut to protect herself. Wherever her real body is, hidden away for safety somewhere near the floodway center, it will have suffered the same injuries as her dream self.
The sky above me, a bright, airy blue, wavers slightly. Lang is in too much pain to hold her desert dream together much longer, and if I don’t act now, she might wake up in the real world and attempt another escape, injuries be damned. An escape attempt that could conclude with another fatal crash or a deadly shootout or a dozen other devastating incidents.
No more. No more pain. No more suffering. No more destruction.
I have to stop her here, end this now.
But my lungs barely inflate with each breath. My arms hang at my side, twisted and useless. My brain feels heavy inside my skull, swelling like Jin’s after the crash. I can’t give chase, and I’m in no mental condition for fine echo content control. Telekinesis and precise transformations require more coherency than I have left—and yet I lose more of it every second I sit here, arguing with myself. Act, Adem. Act now.
My gaze slides across the horizon of the desert expanse. Far, far away, miles it might be, I can make out the edge of the dream. The sand shimmers as a light breeze whirls it from the ground, and waves of orange, silky veils cascade off the end of Lang’s imagination, into the infinite blackness below. Shimmering like glitter. Shimmering like sparks. Shimmering like glass catching midmorning sun.
Glass.
Sand.
Quartz sand melts to glass when heated—
A thundering roar rips across the dunes and pummels my ears. But it’s not Lang’s wind vortex coming to mow me down. It’s one last monster. An elephant-sized beast wearing black, leathery skin, scales on its arms and legs, claws on its paws longer than my torso. Its face vaguely resembles a hawk crossed with a crocodile, but its shape overall is like no animal I’ve ever come across. Useless, deformed bird wings hang from its shoulder blades. Its knees bend backward at the joint. Its chest resembles insect armor: sharp, angular panels with smooth, shell-like faces. It moves the way one would expect a broken doll to move, if such a sad, forgotten thing could breathe life into itself.
It is an imaginary monster, through and through and through, cooked up in a crooked mind. The physical representation of Lang’s personality. Ugly.
The beast emerges from the open gateway of the fortress, scoops Lang into its arms, and settles her half-conscious form on its back. She hangs on with all the strength she has remaining, huffing for air, and points the monster my direction. An attack command. The most complex thought she can manage in her current state, minutes (or less) from a total blackout.
The sky above me wavers more every second, and there’s a rumble deep beneath the dunes. The dream collapse is imminent.
But there is more than enough time left for Lang to kill me.
(And more than enough time left for me to kill Lang.)
So her soul-born monster rockets off toward me. Its feet sink into the sand with each step, but it’s so broad and so tall and powerful that it appears to glide above the sand swirling at its haunches. Its limp wings twitch, spasm, and its off-angled arms rise up, claws extended. As it nears me, its bottom jaw unlocks, and its mouth opens to reveal four rows of razor-sharp teeth stained with brown saliva. A forked tongue lolls out over its flaking black lips. A snarl tears free from its throat and gurgles through its nostrils. Its yellow eyes, sick as poison, lock onto my kneeling body atop the dune.
It winds up to lunge at me, gobble me down, rip off my head and limbs, flay my skin, devour the contents of my guts. Its muscles tense. Its claws reach a peak. Chelsea Lang atop it, determined—to destroy all those who’ve “ruined” her aspirations—yells out a battle cry that comes across as more whine than anything else. The great black beast leaps from the bottom of the dune, kicking a hundred pounds of sand out of its path, and soars up above me, toward the undulating sky, then dives, dives claws first, teeth second, toward the boy with bright red hair and murder in his heart.
I close my eyes.
And release the galaxy of will I’ve been collecting for the past minute and a half. It’s every want and need and whim that has crossed my mind in the past four days, wound up into a ball so dense it’s on the verge of supernova. It’s every fiery spark of repressed anger, pent up from watching good men die, exploding in a chain reaction more violent than a hurricane. It’s every fear I won’t admit steaming to the surface of my skin, and all the prayers I will not speak screaming through my teeth. It’s every shade of bare emotion for Jin and Tanaka and DuPont and Stiegel and all the agents who died in the raid and all the agents who died on the road and all the fools in Finn’s little game. All the emotion I will not show bursts from my brain, into the desert dream beyond, a tsunami against Lang’s waning desire that drowns her in an instant.
I take command of Chelsea Lang’s dream and whisper-shout one single word:
“Burn.”
Heat explodes from my body in all directions. Sand melts as far as the eye can see, flash burning to a field of glass. The clouds in the sky evaporate. The sky itself rips wide open, peeling away from the dome of Lang’s dream space, strips of blue soaring off toward the endless black abyss. Lang’s fortress catches fire and crumbles from the shockwave, reduced to a pile of blackened stones puffing blacker smoke.
The monster two feet from my face disintegrates to ash, and Chelsea Lang, left “untouch
ed” plummets to the ground with a terrified shriek. But the ground is no longer sand, no longer soft to land on, so she slams into the smooth glass ground with a sickening snap, something vital shattering to pieces inside her. And that impact cracks the glass, a long, thin split in the see-through ground into which pours Lang’s blood, leaking from several lacerations.
Above me, the entire sky has now torn away from the boundaries of Lang’s dream, and the rumbling beneath me has grown louder. I peer through the clear glass ground, at the base of the dream, the transparent grounding upon which the echo was built. And witness my glass creation cracking at the seams, a web racing up toward the surface. Near the horizon, the edges of Lang’s dream are breaking up, enormous chunks of sand turned glass falling away.
With a sudden, deafening groan, the foundation of the dream splits in half, and the desert of glass erupts. Like a volcano. Like a dozen volcanoes. Portions of the dream exploding into glass tornadoes, shrieking like a hundred million nails on chalkboards, all at once. Glass shoots up and out and left and right. My entire field of vision dissolves to nothing but a sea of transparent, shimmering, deadly shards.
I raise my arms and whisper with what will my beleaguered body has left, forming a telekinetic shield just large and strong enough to keep the glass from slicing me to death. But Lang, on the ground and nearly unconscious ten feet away, can’t protect herself, and the roiling glass ocean envelops her. I hear her scream, once, twice, three times, and then the sound cuts out with choked finality. And then the dream, untethered from its doomed master, dissolves to nothing.
Just as the broken ground beneath my body collapses into nonexistence, I picture in my mind a door, my bedroom door, opening to let me pass through. And before my dream self tumbles out into the echoverse, lost forever, spinning in the blackness, my mind steps past the invisible doorway, back into my body, back into the real world, back into the place and time where I might be dying.
I wake up buried in the dirt.
Epitaphs (Echoes Book 2) Page 25
